Girlfriends In Space
by TheStoryFiend
Summary: Clara Oswald's normal life is suddenly interrupted by a beautiful, enigmatic woman named Amy Pond, who sweeps her away in her TARDIS, a "spaceship time machine" of her own invention. (Rated T just in case.)
1. Chapter 1

It had been a perfectly normal day. That is, until the school blew up.

Clara Oswald herded her students out of the classroom. The hallways were full of fire and the air rang with sirens and panicked screams.

"Go to the top of the hill!" she shouted at the kids, pointing. "I'm going back inside to look for more people to help!"

The students took off running in the direction she pointed to, and Clara ran back into the smoke-filled building, pulling her cardigan over her mouth to prevent smoke from getting in her lungs.

"Hello? Hello?" she called, running from classroom to classroom. She could hear children's voices up ahead, but the familiar halls had been transformed into a fiery, smoke-filled labyrinth by the conflagration.

She staggered onward for what seemed like ages, calling for the children she could always hear but never reach. The smoke transformed everyday objects hanging on the walls into a terrifying phantasmagoria. Her head began to swim as her lungs filled with the carbon monoxide in the smoke.

"Is anyone here?" she gasped one more time, staggering, coughing, retching. The world went black.

The first thing Clara noticed as she slowly regained consciousness was an insistent beeping sound. Then she felt the IV.

In a moment of pure panic, she jerked upright, clawing at the white sheets on her, fighting desperately to get out of the bed she was in. The blinding light that filled the room burned her eyes, and she felt like she was drowning in a sea of white.

"Woah, woah, calm down, hero girl," said a redheaded woman around Clara's age who appeared by her side. She wrapped her arms around Clara, restraining her. "Calm down, calm down, it's okay."

The redhead's clasp turned into more of a hug as Clara stopped fighting. The strange woman stroked her long brown hair comfortingly and Clara began to relax.

"Where am I?" she inquired when she was calm, surveying the wide, whote room filled with… well, she could only presume it was medical equipment.

"The medical bay," the woman replied, letting her go and moving to check one of the many scanners in the room.

"Medical bay of _what_, though? Just a minute ago I was in a school," Clara said. The look on the other woman's face as she turned to her made her stomach sink.

"It was just a minute ago, right?" she asked anxiously. "Please don't tell me I've been unconscious for days."

"Not _days_," the redhead rushed to reassure her. "Just - well, a day and a half."

Seeing the horrified look on Clara's face, she hurried on.

"Don't worry about it," she said. "You're on a spaceship that's also a time machine. I can get you back to when you need to be."

"A spaceship time machine?" Clara responded sceptically, crossing her arms and then gasping with pain due to the IV.

"Oh! Sorry! Let me take that out."

The woman proceeded to explain as she worked.

"It's my own invention," she told her. "Well, not completely my own, but when does anyone really ever invent anything truly new? Just about every invention is an improvement on an old idea. In fact, I… um… really got off topic, didn't I." She scratched her head awkwardly and continued. "Anyway, I basically mixed together designs for spaceships and time machines until I got one that could do both. I came up with a name for it the other day. Want to hear?"

Clara remained silent, but the stranger pushed on undeterred.

"TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Bit less bulky than saying spaceship time machine, don't you think?" She didn't give Clara any time to reply before continuing.

"But that's not even the best part! Wanna know what the best part is? The size!"

"How d'you mean?" Clara asked.

"It's really big - on the inside. On the outside, though, it's just a 1930s police telephone telephone box. Genius, right?"

Clara, still sceptical, brushed it aside.

"That's great, but I want to know two things: Who are you, and how did I get here?"

The woman rubbed her neck.

"My name is Amy Pond. Your second question, though… well, ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."

Clara sat back down on the bed as Amy bandaged her arm. She gave Amy her most stubborn look."

"I'm not moving until you tell me. If, as you say, we're in a time machine, which by the way I'm still not convinced about, I guess I have the time. So spill," Clara told her.

"Well, then." Amy cleared her throat. "Where to start…"


	2. Chapter 2

_Two days before…_

Amy was really quite concerned about the engines. Ever since the rough landing on planet X-248, they sounded a bit… off.

She woke up early that morning to clank around under the grating in the control room. Just as she was soldering two rather fiddly wires together, the alarms went off.

"Bloody hell!" she swore, throwing down her tools and dashing up to check the scanner. "I landed in a nice, quiet place. Would the universe really implode if I had a quiet day for once?"

The TARDIS hummed, as if warning her not to jinx herself. Sometimes she wondered… but no. It was just a machine. It couldn't be sentient. She was just spending too much time in her old blue box alone, that was all.

"Soon as I'm done here, I'll go visit a nice star cluster," she promised herself. "There was that pretty girl on Kalypsastearun. I might drop by there and visit her."

Focusing back on the task at hand, Amy read the information on the scanner, a concerned frown on her face.

"Oh, that is no good," she muttered. "No good indeed."

She heaved a reluctant sigh.

"Well, I guess I'll have to go check this out," she grumbled to her machine. "It's probably best not to let a fire-breathing lizard run loose around the outskirts of London."

The TARDIS landed near a sign for a school - Coal Hill something-or-other, Amy didn't have time to catch the whole thing - just as the fire alarms went off.

"Bloody hell," she said again, snatching her newly enhanced sonic screwdriver she had been using off the console and running outside. At the door nearest her, a young woman with dark hair - probably a teacher - was directing students toward a safety point.

"Go to the top of the hill!" Amy heard her shout as she drew nearer. "I'm going to go back inside and look for more people to help!"

The students took off and Amy started following their young teacher back into the building. Thank heaven she had thought to bring a partial face mask to protect her from the smoke. The woman she was following didn't seem to have done any such thing. She was staggering down the hallway in front of Amy, calling out for students. Amy rushed forward to catch her just as she collapsed.

'_Oh, God. What do I do now?'_ she thought as she cradled the unconscious woman in her arms. She couldn't very well leave her there on the ground - she'd probably burn to death. But if she tried to carry her back to the TARDIS the school would likely be nothing but a cinder when she got back. Finally she pulled another mask from her pockets and put it on the other woman's head, laying her as far away from the flames as she could.

"Be back in a tick," Amy told her, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. Not surprisingly, she didn't react.

Amy made a mad dash down the corridors, tracking the lizard via a handy feature on the screwdriver. She thanked all the gods she had ever heard of in her travels that she had gotten the gadget.

There! It was inside an empty classroom at the end of the hall. Amy could hear its roars of confusion and rage as she ran towards it.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered, grabbing a fire extinguisher off the wall. "You aren't going to like this one bit."

She pointed the sonic screwdriver at the door and it burst open, releasing a wave of heat and light that almost knocked Amy over. She scrambled to press the release on the extinguisher.

The roaring ceased abruptly, and when Amy opened her eyes again she saw a winged lizard about the size of a medium dog slumped on the ground, covered in whitish foam.

"Oh, my God. A _dragon,"_ she exclaimed, but she didn't have time to wonder. The source of the flames had been extinguished, true, but the fire was still spreading and that poor girl was probably still lying in the corridor. Amy scooped up the dragon (which was thankfully light) and took off running down the corridor.

The teacher was lying right where Amy had left her, but the flames were getting closer and closer. She scooped her up, throwing her unceremoniously over her shoulder, and escaped the flaming building, heading for the TARDIS. Amy barely had enough time to put the woman in the medical bay and the dragon in one of the spare, fire-proofed rooms, before she too collapsed, overcome by exhaustion and smoke.


	3. Chapter 3

"So that's how you came to be here," Amy finished. "And now that you know what happened to you, may I inquire as to what your name is?"

"Clara Oswald. I'm a teacher at Coal Hill Secondary School," she replied a bit absently. "So you're telling me there's a dragon on here?"

"Um. It's not really a dragon…" Amy trailed off as Clara hopped off the bed and marched determinedly toward the door leading to the hall.

"You want me to believe you? Then you'd better show me this dragon," she announced.

"You know, for such a tiny thing you really have a powerful presence," Amy mumbled.

Clara blinked, obviously trying to figure out if that was a compliment. The much taller red-head pushed herself off the wall where she had been leaning with a slight smirk and lead the way into the hallway.

The hall was much bigger than Clara expected. Amy walked ahead of her confidently, navigating her way through the (to Clara's eyes) bewildering labyrinth of rooms, branches, and (once) large holes in the floor.

"What's down there?" Clara asked her guide as they edged their way around it.

"Oh, it's just another hallway. The gravity switches once you go in it. Don't ask me how." Clara marveled at how nonchalantly Amy said all this, as if it was perfectly normal to live in an immense rabbit warren with hallways that magically switched their gravitational pull.

_It's just like Alice in Wonderland,_ she thought to herself. _Oh, dear. I do hope I'm not high on opiates or something. Maybe this is all some sort of elaborate pre-death hallucination. _She quickly abandoned that train of thought. Even if it were true, there wouldn't be anything she could do about it, and as far as hallucinations go this one wasn't too bad.

"I thought you built this place. How do you not know how it works?" she asked instead.

"Well, first of all I didn't build _all_ of the TARDIS, just most of it. And second of all, the main reason why I said 'Don't ask me why' is because it would take forever to explain all the science behind it, unless you happen to have a PhD in physics. Do you?" Amy had reached the other side of the hole and held out her hand to help Clara the rest of the way. A bit offended by the seemingly implied insult to her intelligence, Clara coldly ignored it and got the rest of the way herself.

"No, I don't," she sniffed, and something in her tone must have tipped Amy off to her irritation.

"Oh, I hope you didn't take that to mean that I think you aren't smart enough to understand! I mean, from what I've seen you're very brave and keep a cool head under pressure and since you're a teacher I'm sure you're terribly clever too and-"

Clara cut her off with a wave of her hand.

"It's okay, I knew what you meant. I've just had kind of a crazy day so far," she said. "But if we don't get to that dragon soon I'm going to be quite displeased."

"Yes ma'am," Amy said with a small bow and a wide smile. "It's just up here to the right." She pointed to a black door that looked quite a bit sturdier than a normal door. As they observed it, it trembled slightly.

"Is that normal?" Clara asked, just now beginning to be troubled by the implications of approaching a live, fire-breathing dragon.

"Oh, don't worry about it. It's only about the size of a labrador," Amy reassured her, but somehow Clara suspected that she was a bit nervous too. "Thankfully, this fireproof room has a special venting system. I'll give it something to calm it down before we go in."

"You're giving it anaesthesia?" she asked. "Do you have training in this?"

"Oh, sure. I mean, I _am_ a doctor," Amy said airily.

"Seriously? As in, MD doctor, not PhD doctor?" Clara was sceptical.

"PhD. But that's okay, I've done this kind of thing before." She walked with confidence to the door and, opening a hatch that Clara hadn't noticed before, started punching buttons. Clara quickly moved to stand beside her to observe.

"There," Amy announced after a bit of fiddling. "Now we just wait for a minute or two, to give the gas some time to take effect. It's not like how you see in the movies - it takes a bit for the chemicals to kick in, and he's not going to be entirely unconscious, either, just woozy. But he won't be able to breathe fire at us!" she said brightly.

Clara held her breath, listening carefully to hear when the dragon stopped moving around. After a good two or three minutes of silence, Amy announced:

"Okay! We should be good to go!" and swung the door open.

Sure enough, there was a scaly gray winged lizard lying in the middle of the floor. Amy boldly strode up to it and knelt down.

"Hey there, buddy," she half-whispered, stroking it soothingly. "I know you're scared. I'm sorry. Don't worry, we'll get you home."

Clara approached it cautiously. She was impressed by Amy's tender manner but wasn't quite convinced that the little dragon wasn't a threat anymore.

Sensing her hesitation, Amy looked up from her ministrations and patted the floor next to her, inviting the other woman to sit beside her.

"Don't worry about this little guy," she said as Clara sat down gingerly. "He was just scared. The gas has made him very calm and relaxed. He won't attack you."

Taking Clara's hand, Amy guided her toward the sleepy lizard and helped her stroke its wings. Clara observed it carefully.

"They're a bit like bat wings," she said, indicating the large, whitish wings draped over its body.

"Yep! This particular lizard race evolved from an animal quite similar to a bat or even a pterodactyl, except instead of being mammalian, like Earth's bats, they were lizards. Cool, huh?"

Clara nodded, continuing to stroke the lizard.

Amy continued. "He's not really a dragon in the traditional Earth sense. He doesn't hoard gold or snatch maidens or anything. In fact, he's not even terribly intelligent. But there are other lizard races on his planet that are quite intelligent." She paused, taking a deep breath.

Clara looked up at her, cocking her head questioningly. The other woman avoided her eyes, turning slightly away and scratching her head.

"Um, well, I'm going to have to take this little guy home, and since you're already here with me… Would you like to come along and see some dragons?" she rushed out.

"Absolutely!" Clara exclaimed. Seeing the little lizard creature had pretty much swept away all of her doubt, and an opportunity to see a planet full of dragons just sounded to cool to miss.

Amy beamed at her.

"All right, then!" she said, getting up and offering her hand to Clara. "It's time for you to see the control room."


End file.
